Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Hentai Game Review - Tokyo Tenma

Your blog hits have fallen through the floor. Quick, give them a review of a mucky game.

Okay okay. First off, the final part of Monster Girl Quest Chapter 3 has been translated to English. You can find it here on RogueTranslator’s blog (and the actual game can be bought from here). If you stumbled here by accident and are new to all this I highly recommend checking out Monster Girl Questas it’s (still) the high benchmark for this type of game.

And so onto Tokyo Tenma. I missed this first time around. I like my monster girls to be bad and in control of the H-scenes and this looked more like a game where the hero shows the girls what for and builds up a harem through repeated use of his big “weapon” (Personally I have no ideological problems with that type of game – they just don’t stimulate my kinks). Tokyo Tenma is a game where the hero does build up a willing harem of monster girls, but despite not featuring any Game-Over-Rape, the H-scenes are probably closer in tone to games like Monster Girl Quest and Violated Hero.

Fortunately, grabbing it later, after it was recommended on forums of Monster Girl Unlimited, meant I managed to miss all the game-breaking bugs that afflicted the game on release. Most of that has been ironed out and it’s a pretty good game.

You'd be right to be concerned by those tails...

Plot- and mechanics-wise it’s very similar to the mainstream Shin Megami Tensei series. A strange blackout hits Tokyo and both demons and angels show up for a ruckus. You play a dude that posts the highest score in a mysterious game and gets a guardian angel or demon for a bodyguard as a prize (Either a Crow Tengu or Fenrir demon depending on how the player answers five initial questions). The player can recruit other monster girls to their fighting team. This is done through answering questions correctly, having the right inventory items to gift to them, or the right monster girl present in your fighting squad when attempting to recruit them.

There is no Game-Over-Rape (it’s not a sex battle game – let the girls beat you up and you get a simple “Game Over” screen to reward your uselessness). The hentai elements are provided during the contract scenes when you recruit fresh monster girls to your team. Meet the right conditions and you’re rewarded with two different H-scenes for each girl. These can be skipped and viewed later (or re-viewed) at “Slave Rose” points on the map. Oddly, given the method of recruitment and the “Slave Rose” facilities where recruits are “trained”, the H-scenes often have the monster girl in the dominant role (at least the ones I chose to view did).

Now who's the slave here again?

It’s also another hentai game with noble aspirations to be an actual game. Each of the monster girls unlocks different skills as they level up. As with most RPGs you’ll want to put together a balanced team (The sprite is quite useful for her healing magic). At one point I thought the game might be a little too easy as it didn’t seem to matter how under-levelled the other girls on my team were. Then in the later dungeons I ran into monsters with attacks (confusion, stun, sleep) that took my main (and highest-levelled) character out of combat. Those fights didn’t go so well . . .

The artwork is fine. One thing I liked is that the battle sprites aren’t completely static. The animations are simple sprite transformations, but are very effective at giving the monster girl enemies a little extra – ahem! - jiggle and bounce. Some girls will hit the spot, some won’t, and it will vary from person to person depending on their kinks. There’s a good variety to choose from, so there should be something for everyone (although I was a little disappointed the pink slime girl in the tutorial fight doesn’t get a scene).

Sorry slime girl fans, she ain't available.

The game is a hybrid of top-down 2D RPG-maker type wandering about and pseudo-3D Dungeon Master-esque dungeon crawling. As with most games like this you’ll have to struggle through some garbled machine translations to work out which quests unlock certain areas. If you get stuck there is a helpful guide thread on the ULMF forums.

Overall the game isn’t up to the same standard as Monster Girl Quest and the artwork doesn’t match the lushness of the Violated Hero series, but if you’ve exhausted those games and want something new it might be worth a look.

And speaking of something new, I hope no one minds if I sneak in a plug for my brand new book, a tasty new collection featuring lots of delectably depraved succubus action. If you like this type of game, you’ll also enjoy my books.